long article most should just skip

Higher Calling

To improve our schools, we need to make it harder to become a teacher.

So far this month in education news, a California court has decimated rigid job protections for teachers, and Oklahoma’s governor has abolished
the most rigorous learning standards that state has ever had. Back and
forth we go in America’s exhausting tug-of-war over schools—local versus
federal control, union versus management, us versus them.

But something else is happening, too. Something that hasn’t made many
headlines but has the potential to finally revolutionize education in
ways these nasty feuds never will.

In a handful of statehouses and universities across the country, a
few farsighted Americans are finally pursuing what the world’s smartest
countries have found to be the most efficient education reform ever
tried. They are making it harder to become a teacher. Ever so slowly,
these legislators and educators are beginning to treat the preparation
of teachers the way we treat the training of surgeons and
pilots—rendering it dramatically more selective, practical, and
rigorous. All of which could transform not only the quality of teaching
in America but the way the rest of us think about school and learning.

Selectivity sends a message to everyone in the country that education is important—and that teaching is damn hard to do.

Over the past two years, according to a report out Tuesday from the National Council on Teacher Quality,
33 states have passed meaningful new oversight laws or regulations to
elevate teacher education in ways that are much harder for universities
to game or ignore. The report, which ranks 836 education colleges, found
that only 13 percent made its list of top-ranked programs. But “a
number of programs worked hard and at lightning speed” to improve. Ohio,
Tennessee, and Texas now have the most top-ranked programs. This
summer, meanwhile, the Council for Accreditation of Educator Preparation
is finalizing new standards, which Education Week called
“leaner, more specific and more outcomes-focused than any prior set in
the 60-year history of national teacher-college accreditation.”

Rhode Island, which once had one of the nation’s lowest entry-bars
for teachers, is leading the way. The state has already agreed to
require its education colleges to admit classes of students with a mean
SAT, ACT, or GRE score in the top one-half of the national distribution
by 2016. By 2020, the average score must be in the top one-third of the
national range, which would put Rhode Island in line with education
superpowers like Finland and Singapore.

Unlike the brawls we’ve been having over charter schools and testing,
these changes go to the heart of our problem—an undertrained educator
force that lacks the respect and skills it needs to do a very hard 21st-century job. (In one large survey,
nearly 2 in 3 teachers reported that schools of education do not
prepare teachers for the realities of the classroom.) Instead of trying
to reverse engineer the teaching profession through complicated
evaluations leading to divisive firings, these changes aspire to reboot
it from the beginning.

To understand why this movement matters so much, it helps to talk to a
future teacher who has experienced life with—and without—this reform.
Sonja Stenfors, 23, is a teacher-in-training from Finland, one of the
world’s most effective and fair education systems. Stenfors’ father is a
physical education teacher, and she’s training to be one, too.

In Finland, Stenfors had to work very hard to get into her
teacher-training program. After high school, like many aspiring
teachers, she spent a year as a classroom aide to help boost her odds of
getting accepted. The experience of working with 12 boys with severe
behavioral problems almost did her in. “It was so hard,” she told me, “I
worried I could not do it.”

By the time the year ended, she had begun the application process for
the University of Turku’s elementary education program. After
submitting her scores from the Finnish equivalent of the SAT, she read a
dense book on education published solely for education-school
applicants. Several weeks later, she took a two-hour test on what she
had read. The content of the book was beside the point, Stenfors says.
“I think it really measures your motivation.”

After she passed the test, Stenfors sat down for an intense in-person
interview with two education professors. They described a real-world
classroom scenario involving disengaged students and asked how she would
respond. They probed her experience in the classroom. Stenfors went
home worried, unsure how she’d done. Unlike most American students, she
knew many people who had been rejected from education schools.

A month later, she got her letter. Like all of Finland’s
teacher-training colleges, the university accepted only about 10 percent
of applicants for elementary education in 2010, and Stenfors was one of
them. “I was so happy and excited. I called everybody,” she remembers.

By accepting so few applicants,Finnish teacher colleges accomplish
two goals—one practical, one spiritual: First, the policy ensures that
teachers-to-be like Stenfors are more likely to have the education,
experience, and drive to do their jobs well. Second (and this part
matters even more), this selectivity sends a message to everyone in the
country that education is important—and that teaching is damn hard to
do. Instead of just repeating these claims over and over like Americans,
the Finns act like they mean it.

Once received, that message has cascading benefits. If taxpayers,
politicians, parents, and—especially—kids know that teaching is a master
profession, they begin to trust teachers more over time. Teachers
receive more autonomy in the classroom, more recognition on the street
and sometimes even more pay. As one American exchange student told me
about her peers in Finland, “The students were well aware of how
accomplished their teachers were. I got the feeling the students saw
school not as something to endure but something from which they stood to
benefit.” Without those signals, teachers suffer deep cuts that go
beyond salary.

This school year, after three years of studying in her Finnish
university, Stenfors came to America to study abroad at the University
of Missouri–Kansas City. Right away, Stenfors noticed a subtle but
powerful distinction. It happened whenever she met someone new in
America—in her apartment complex, at parties, wherever she went. “Every
time I told them I am studying to be a teacher, people said, ‘Oh, that’s
interesting.’ ” They nodded politely and moved to other, less dreary
conversational territory.

“I was very proud when I said it,” Stenfors says. “But they were not
so excited.” She noticed that when her friend told people she was
studying business, the friend got asked follow-up questions about what
she wanted to do with her degree. “I didn’t get any extra questions.”

In a blog post
she wrote from Kansas City, Missouri, Stenfors reported her finding
home: “Here it’s not cool to study to be a teacher,” she wrote in
Finnish. “They perceive a person who is studying to be a teacher as a
little dumber. …Could you imagine [being] ashamed when telling people you are studying to be a teacher?”

Stenfors felt this rebuke like a polite slap to the face. Without
realizing it, she’d grown accustomed to people finding her studies
impressive in Finland. There, studying to be a teacher was equivalent to
studying to be a lawyer or a doctor. Even though teachers still earned
less than those professionals, prestige served as its own kind of
compensation—one that changed the way she thought of her work and
herself.

Why did the Finns respect teachers more? Well, one reason was
straightforward: Education college was hard in Finland, and it wasn’t
usually very hard in America. Respect flowed accordingly. The University
of Missouri–Kansas City admits two-thirds of those who apply. To enter
the education program, there is no minimum SAT or ACT score. Students
have to have a B average, sit for an interview, and pass an online test
of basic academic skills.

Once enrolled, Stenfors’ American peers had to do just two semesters
of student teaching—compared to her four semesters in Finland. They had a
lot of multiple-choice quizzes (a first for Stenfors). Unlike her
Finnish professors, her American instructors encouraged discussion,
which Stenfors admired. But overall, the university offered less
rigorous, hands-on classroom coaching from experienced teachers—the most
important kind of teacher preparation.

The good news is that Finland used to be a lot like the U.S. In 1968,
Finland had far more training programs for teachers than it needed.
(The U.S. educates twice as many teachers as we need.) That year,
Finland shut down those schools and reopened them in the eight most
elite universities in the country. In time, Finland’s education schools
became places where teachers conducted original research in order to
graduate and spent hundreds of hours planning, practicing, teaching real
students, and discussing what they had done right and wrong with
veteran teachers.

Today, Finnish teachers have more freedom and time to collaborate and
innovate than they did in the past—without the burden of top-down
accountability policies common to low-trust systems. Parents and
politicians in Finland do not pity teachers or treat them like charity
cases the way so many do in the U.S. They treat them like grown-up
professionals with a very hard job to do.

The lesson for America is obvious: No one gets respect by demanding
it. Teachers and their colleges must earn the prestige they need by
being the same kind of relentless intellectual achievers they’re asking
America’s children to be.

I see that ilive beat me. that was my first thought. make it a high paying job. considering what it is...I don't understand why it isn't. that and considering what the job description is. I would think u would need a masters or a PhD in whatever it is that you teach. And that you would have to "apprentice" like a mason or summin'. To be a school teacher in the states is treated like a fall back job. You don't want to be a medical assistant so take this course instead. Primary, Middle school and HS teachers should get the same prestige as a Uni Professor would.

But yeah...gubberment don't really care about the kids so these articles seem moot to me.

People need to be more concerned about the school system not hiring male/female pedophiles as teachers. Seems like everything I turn around there's another story in the news about a teacher having inappropriate relationships, or corresponding inappropriately with their underage students. IMO background checks & mental health screenings need to be thoroughly conducted on teachers. It's the parents job to make sure their children are given the best education. If you want your child to have a good education don't enroll them in a C, D or F school. Simple as that.

It should be slightly harder to become a teacher, but easier to keep a license. If doctors don't have to renew their licenses, then neither should we. Additionally, if you are going to make the requirements more stringent, then you need to pay teachers a lot more and give them more power and respect than they are currently getting.

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